Finally John Carpenter hits this list, now if all the hints about Halloween didn’t help you then for many, many years he was my favourite director and I still hold him in very high regards and you will see that if you stick with this to the top movies that I like then you will see a few near the end of this list. This one was an eighties child released in 1986 it cost under $25m (between $19m to $25m apparently) it went on to flop at the box making just $11.1m which may have been the start of Carpenters slide from fantastic movies into mediocracy. It stars Kurt Russell, Kim Cattrall, Dennis Dun and James Hong. After bombing the critics gave it a reasonable score and leads me neatly in the Tri-Critic Sync Challenge as we have another 4% difference between the three with IMDb giving it a 7.3/10 & 77% from the Rotten Tomatoes mob.
Shall I move onto the highly confusing plot. Which may not be that complex if you are paying attention. Jack is a truck driver that wins a bet and to ensure he doesn’t get cheated out of the winnings he ends up going to the airport with his Chinese friend Wang who is collecting his girlfriend. A Chinese street gang called the Lords of Death try to kidnap a girl at the airport and when Jack and Wang stop them, they take Wang’s girlfriend instead. They try and track the gang’s whereabouts down to a backstreet in Little China where a mass fight breaks out between them and another rival gang. Three gods of storms arrive and kick the ass of the rival gang to the point where Jack uses his truck to drive through the middle of the warfare to break it up. In the middle of it all is an old Chinese man directing the Storm’s. Called Lo Pan he is the real villain of the piece and Jack runs him over. Only to see that he is fine but glowing with magical powers. They give chase and return later to discover that his truck is missing as well. The investigate (truck drivers are good detectives) leads them to learning about the ancient Chinese mystics which has been brought to America. Well it turns out (spoilers) that Lo Pan needs to sacrifice girlies with green eyes to keep his magical energy topped up but to rid himself of the curse he must marry a green-eyed girl and then give her to the gods as punishment. Hence all the women being kidnapped and the magical powers everywhere. Not exactly sure where the orangutan type massive monster fits into this but it appears and is also on Lo Pan’s side also.
Enjoyable movie yes, with John Carpenters sense of humour and not the requirement to try to be scary or spooky he could just play it the way he wanted to and he wanted it to be funny and adventurous which he delivered in bucket loads. It’s an entertaining and enjoyable movie that has after disappointment at the box office it has found its market in the cult following world and that may be the wrong tag for it also. As when I see something labelled with a cult following it either means its rubbish but a small number of people like it or its good but no one knows about it. This movie is a good movie that just took its time for its audience to find it which may well be a john Carpenter trait that will haunt him for a while (yes there are some other reviews coming as well.
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